March 25, 1999

A Web Surfer's Guide to Ancient British Past

By MICHAEL POLLAK

In the beginning, when the glaciers had retreated and the land
was young, when warrior kings
and their priests had learned how to
use awe and fear, and even before
they had learned to use an alphabet,
there was Stonehenge.

Well, actually, before Stonehenge,
there was Avebury, 20 miles to the
north.

Bigger and more elaborate
than Stonehenge, Avebury, near Silbury Hill, is the largest prehistoric
mound in Europe. In fact, southwestern England is studded with giant
stone monuments and burial
mounds, built by thousands of prehistoric men and women over thousands of years in the late Neolithic
and early Bronze Ages.

A village later grew up within Avebury's circle, and between the efforts
of anti-pagan moralists and building-supply scavengers, Avebury's stones
have been ravaged.

It is Stonehenge, standing on the
Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, safer
from builders and destroyers, that
has caught the world's historical and
mystical fancy.

On a Web site named The Complete Stonehenge (www.amherst.edu/~ermace/sth/sth.html), on a page
titled Why I'm Obsessed, the site's
creator, Emily Mace, wrote, "Something profound, something wonderful, something magnificent must
have happened when I saw that monument."

Her site is part of the Stone Circle Web Ring (easyweb.easynet.co.uk/aburnham/ring), a group of more
than 100 sites dealing with dolmens,
menhirs, barrows, burial mounds
and theories varying from the informed to the fanciful to the extraterrestrial: Dark Isle, Archaeoastronomy, Crystalinks, Megalithica,
The Ley Hunter Journal, Stones of
Wonder, How the Shaman Stole the
Moon, and straight on till morning.
For those who want to start a tour,
a wonderful guide is The Megalith Map, an index with the location of
any known stone circle or row in the
British Isles (members.tripod.com/megalithic). All of Britain and Ireland are gridded: click on a map grid
and you get little symbols for each
site. Try Stonehenge, and you get not
only the visual and textual geography, but also a list of 16 other Web
sites with more information.

The Megalith Map is produced
with the help of Aubrey Burl, the
author of many books on prehistoric
Britain, including "A Guide to the
Stone Circles of Britain and Ireland"
(Yale University Press, 1995).

A less comprehensive but highly
readable map guide, Ancient Britain,
provides more information about
fewer megalithic sites, along with
many pictures (www.weldwood.demon.co.uk/ancient.htm). The
writer calls Avebury a far more rewarding place to visit than Stonehenge. "The atmosphere of the
stones," the writer says of Stonehenge, "is long gone and with each
visit I find it a little more depressing
than the last." (English Heritage, the
Government-sponsored preservation
group, is planning a major relocation
of the roads and tourist buildings to
help improve the scenic beauty.)

There are few signs of long-term
settlement contemporaneous with
Stonehenge and Avebury, and this
absence has given rise to the notion
that the builders were nomadic
tribes. But the notion that nomads
planned and executed a virtual city
of religious and astronomical significance seems even more far-fetched:
some of the monument's bluestones are believed to have been
transported more than 100 miles,
from hills in Wales, and required
hundreds of laborers, who had to be
housed and fed. And then there were
the gold ornaments and bronze daggers buried in many of the graves,
implying the existence of a nobility
and an artisan class.

One thing the historians are sure
of is that the builders were not Druids; those animist forest-dwellers arrived long after Stonehenge was
built. The Brittania Web site's Earth Mysteries pages by Chris Witcombe
has a section on Druids (britannia.com/wonder/earth/druids.html).

The builders of Stonehenge left no
alphabet but knew astronomy: the
lintel stones and the "heel stone" to
the east of the circles form a giant
sundial in line with the summer solstice. English Heritage has done extensive radiocarbon dating of the
site, dating antlers in the surrounding ditch to 3000 B.C., many of the
main stones to between 2800 and 2200
B.C., and other parts to 1400 B.C. To
some archeologists, the most amazing thing about Stonehenge is not the
construction itself but the huge span
of time, more than 1,500 years, in
which it held an active place in prehistoric society.